PicoBlog

They really played Gamehendge. It happened. While the rumors had been present for the last few months and the absence of any songs from the story earlier in the run made it seem more likely to be the gag, I never truly believed that Phish would perform guitarist Trey Anastasio’s senior thesis on stage for New Year’s Eve. But it happened. In the early days of Phish, when Anastasio was a student at Goddard College, he composed The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, a story about a retired colonel who finds himself whisked away to the magical land of Gamehendge and thrust into a plot to overthrow the evil king Wilson.

Trey Anastasio & Classic TAB came north of the border last night for a rare show in Toronto. While Phish has performed here recently in 2022 and 2019, this is the first hometown TAB show for me since 2017 and the first one with the stripped-down quartet that has been blazing its way across the Midwest for the past couple of weeks. After listening along to the previous shows of the tour, my anticipation was high due to the incredible interplay on display every night between Anastasio and bassist Dezron Douglas, who seems to get more confident and assertive on each tour he plays as a part of TAB.

The dunnock is the Cinderella of the bird world. Sweeping up underneath the other birds, and always missing out on the celebrity invitations (try finding a dunnock-themed Christmas card). However, like the robins and wrens, dunnocks are all around us, and they bring some welcome music to the winter months. The sweet, high-pitched stream of notes sounds somewhat thin, almost fragile. It can be most noticeable on bright, frosty days, when its crystalline qualities somehow complement the weather conditions.

The green is the biggest of our three woodpeckers, and rather different from both the spotted varieties in looks, sounds and habits.  The call we’re most likely to recognise is the loud, gull-like, laughing cry that gives them their traditional name, ‘yaffle’. (Fans of Bagpuss will remember that Professor Yaffle is a woodpecker, with the twist that he’s made of wood rather than making holes in it.) There’s some disagreement as to whether this ought to be described as the bird’s song, but it’s certainly the sound the carries far and wide in the spring when green woodpeckers are pairing up again after winters spent alone.

If someone announces to you, “I’ve just seen a lesser spotted woodpecker!”, you are perfectly entitled to: Tweak them gently on the nose Tell them: “No, you didn’t.” Walk away without another word Lesser spotted woodpeckers were originally named for their titchy proportions in comparison to the great spotted woodpecker. Lessers really are small fry in the woodpecker world, only the size of a sparrow. Sadly ‘lesser spotted’ has also become an accurate guide to your likelihood of finding one.

I’m pretty sure I somehow mistreated shrimp chips in a past life, because this recipe has been absolutely impossible to get right. It has failed cross-testing at Serious Eats three times. (Which is why you’re now finding it here, and not there.) I originally made a version of this for my Avatar the Last Airbender cookbook (for the Fire Flakes), and it worked great—until I had to make them again. So now, after almost a dozen failed attempts across 4 different shrimp chip methods, here’s what I have.

It starts with a text from a friend: "he looks just like you!", where 'he' is a human male painted by an artificial intelligence in response to the prompt "man can't hold so many shrimp". He does look just like you. How funny.  Recent analyses have claimed that there are at most two billion recognizable faces, given parameters that produce definitively human subjects. Celebrities are increasingly picked from beyond these constraints, resulting in an artistic class of uncanny mutants, fae at best and deformed cretins at worst.

Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, released an exceptional article today on the culture at Palantir and how they initially began. For any long term bull, it is a must read, primarily because it gives you a glimpse into the culture your money is funding as an investor. A culture of winning. Shyam’s tweet on this article: So in this tweet, Shyam Sankar previews what he is going to say in his article.

We strive to feature a variety of genres in our Smile for a Saturday pieces and often seek inspiration from the past. We have found that old music holds up very well, as do throwback memories of iconic public figures. But one area in which we struggle is comedy; many routines age about as well as a tuna fish sandwich.  The topical references that make comedy resonate with contemporary viewers are so transitory as to become arcane over time —  incomprehensible without footnotes (and footnotes are rarely funny).